We didn't get very far, I guess. When you take a comparative religion class, the way that they were started and evolved is the same thing over and over, and it dawns, very quickly, that "my religion," whatever it is, is not exempt from the pattern. And it's kind of absurd to attempt that defense. So religion to comparative religion to philosophy is a natural progression. And in the process, you move into the driver's seat, you assume your agency instead of ceding to whatever holy book belief you once fell prey to. This is the good as i see it. What if heaven, or nirvana, etc. is for those who DON'T accept some fundamentalism and, instead, use their agency and critical thinking to transcend such superstition and belief. The disciplines of psychology and philosophy indicate that is exactly the case.

There is room for both the religious stories and the philosophy/psychology. The stories are simpler and scale better but the latter is more precise. It’s like having a basic instruction manual and a more detailed one.

Misinterpretation is an issue with story, but intellectualization is just as much of an issue for philosophy/psychology. We are on the ocean reading the stars using intuition. The manuals can assist us, but they cannot be used as substitutes.

I earned a degree in Philosophy, and then taught part-time at a community college for six years before I became a Christian.

The fact that it is society that places the belief in any particular god in the minds of people, instead of god, is borne out by the distribution of religions within borders/nations. The religions of Christianity, Hinduism, Islam, Judaism ... are all taught and indoctrinated into their populations, so, obviously, specific religions rule particular regions. Is this the way it would be if god was revealing itself to mankind? No.

Would there be countless denominations of Christianity if it was actually coming from god, or is this a sure sign it is being devised by mankind instead?

Socially constructed stories with socially constructed gods are the foundations that civilizations are built on. To disagree with that is to have a deficient or shallow understanding of evolution.

Revelation happens through the process of engaging with socially constructed stories. Or revelation can happen through individual development of consciousness, which society is supposed to support.

Unless you are actually God, or have an actual revelation from God, you would have no way knowing how God would or would not reveal Himself to mankind. DUCY?

No reason to automatically dismiss that possibility.
Not a sure sign of anything.

Let me see if I'm reading this right...

lagtight is saying that the framework of morality comes from God. That people killing babies for fun or flying planes into buildings are doing evil, because God teaches what is right and what is wrong through Scripture. In fact, having a moral framework in and of itself is proof of God's existence. If there exists different degrees of morality, that some things are morally better than other things, then that implies that if you go further and further Morally Right, you reach perfection, and that is God.

Meanwhile, Fella is saying that the people that flew those planes into those buildings were acting from their own moral framework. Their interpretation of morality led them to do a terrible thing, and they were as certain in their beliefs being right as lagtight is certain that it's wrong to murder/suicide 3k people. It's disingenuous and relativistic to compare or conflate the two frameworks. Most of all, for humans historically it has been an abused and corrupting power to get to be the one who decides for societal purposes which is right and which is wrong.

Am I on the right track?

I have a question for you, lagtight.

Do you dispute the scientific evidence of the Theory of Evolution?

Your catchy yet flippant "from the goo to the zoo to you" seems to imply that you have doubts that anatomically modern humans descended from apes around 100,000 years ago.

I know devout deist scientists that can have it both ways. God made the Big Bang 13.8 billion years ago, this planet formed 4.5 billion years ago, and life evolved to what it is today.

But I've also noticed that the more assured a person's faith, the less likely they think critically or empirically about the Scientific Method.

LOL UsernameTaken. Working around your ban, I see...

If you say so.

Clearly, it's not going as well as it is for a certain someone who thinks that I'm monitoring the forum expectantly for them to announce their return.

Ethics is abstract so when one tries to personify it into a god they are basically just making it up ... a pure fiction. Even if morality does revert back to a god, which one? Oh, the one prominent in my time and place, in my culture, of course. What's the problem with that? LOL.

Ethicists are hardly those in political power, corrupted by their positions. Forfeiting agency in morality and ethics to personified, fictional, brutal, ignorant, ancient, superstitious, magical thinking peoples and gods is evil, not moral.

I dispute the interpretation of the evidence that would lead one to believe in Evolution.

No, I do not believe that humans descended from apes.

Indeed, there are many Theists, including many devout Christians, who believe in Theistic Evolution.

That has not been my experience. But, even it that was also my experience, that is irrelevant as to whether or not Evolution is true.

Speaking from a scientific perspective, I find questions about abiogenesis (whatever happened on this planet when it went from non-life to life) to be endlessly fascinating.

Scientists openly admit they don't know how life began on this planet, but there are lots of theories. They've tried, (many, many times) to synthesize something living from inorganic precursors, but have been unable to do so. What science HAS learned is an exciting spark for more research, and raises ever more deeper questions.

Pretty much every cell of everything living has a cell membrane with a phospholipid bilayer... it's basically drawn like a sperm tadpole with two tails. There's a "head" made of glycerol, which is polar, and two fatty acid chain "tails," which are non-polar. Because water is a polar medium, if you put a bunch of phospholipids in water, it will spontaneously arrange itself in a two-deep layer with the water-loving polar heads facing outward, and the water-hating nonpolar tails facing inward.

RNA is both very complex in its diversity, but also very simple in that it's made of the same building blocks and follows the same rules as everything else. On a molecular level, it's a very simple jump from (possibly spontaneous?) chemical reactions to its propensity to replicate itself. I admit that's a black box and a bright line that we haven't crossed or been able to repeat in a lab.

Viruses contain RNA or DNA, and have been around at least as long as life has been around. Interestingly, most scientists think viruses don't even meet the definition of "life," because they can't replicate without parasitizing a host cell, but that's a whole other philosophical conversation. It's still hotly debated.

There's no shortage of complex "organic" (by that I mean "carbon-containing") molecules, in the early Earth, in planets and moons without life, and in gas clouds or on space rocks throughout the universe.

What if some phospholipids were laying around in some goo, some complex organic chemical similar to RNA was enveloped, and began replicating itself as a progenitor proto-virus/cell? Could this be the long-hypothesized LUCA? (Last Universal Common Ancestor)

If you look at the sequences of the DNA and RNA, there are similarities that imply evolutionary relationships between all living things, from people to single-celled organisms, AND viruses.

I realize this might offend your most deeply held, cherished beliefs. I think it's possible that life just happened, there is no purpose other than propagating itself, and any deeper meaning is whatever sentient beings imbue upon it.

...Not saying I believe that. I'm still testing hypotheses and gathering evidence in forming my beliefs... more research is needed (:

Another question for you... do you believe it's possible that life could arise on other planets? Intelligent or otherwise.

If the answer is no, and evidence of life is found within your lifetime, would that cause you to re-evaluate... everything?

I believe life is possible elsewhere, even though we haven't found any yet... and if we did during my lifetime, I'd probably have an existential freakout with the rest of humanity.

Imagine fossilized eukaryotic single-celled life in Mars' polar ice caps! Or living extremophiles in Europa's geothermal ocean vents! Even that would be a HUUUUUGE deal with far-reaching implications.

Arthur C Clarke: "Two possibilities exist: we're definitely alone in the universe, or we're not. Both are equally terrifying."

I believe that God can create life on other planets if He chooses to do so.

I don't believe that life can simply "arise" anywhere.

Could that include sentient non-human beings with eternal souls?

The scientists are spinning an illusion "life can only come from life"--Francesco Redi . It should be apparent that within the mineral kingdom there is no space for spontaneous generation or abiogenesis.

Sure. Angels, for example, are sentient non-human beings with eternal souls.

It's the talking snake, man. It's none of this. What's wrong with you? Where's your faith in the myths and angel stories?

The odds are very, very long, too long, goes the argument, for the right series of events to happen for life to come into being without a creator. Never mind that in the universe as we know it chemical soups abounded with trillions of googolplexes of opportunities for these chemical long shots to happen and to sequence effectively. Never mind that. It's the talking snake story that's true. So on top of everything else, theology is ignorant of probability.

Definitely

That's a pretty strong word. Do you know what it means?

For people interested in science and the probability of intelligent life:
https://www.liebertpub.com/doi/10.1089/ast.2019.2149

According to this recent highly detailed science publication, except for us humans, intelligent life should be exceptionally rare in the universe, if it exists at all.

"The model offers a number of testable predictions. First, we conclude that intelligent life is exceptionally rare and that we may possibly be the only intelligent civilization within the observable universe, so long as we assume that intelligent life elsewhere requires similar evolutionary transitions. Although this may seem like a large assumption, there are good reasons to believe that many evolutionary transitions have universal properties (Levin et al., 2017). It also follows if we reason that our civilization is typical. If there were substantially easier evolutionary pathways to intelligent life that did not require such evolutionary transitions, we should expect to observe this easier evolutionary history instead. Although it is hard to show beyond doubt the absence of extraterrestrial intelligence, so far all of our astronomical data are consistent with being alone"


We humans seem to be anomaly in the universe. Draw whatever implications you want from that idea.

I've never believed that "intelligent life" demands 2 arms, 2 legs, 10 fingers, and 10 toes.

I believe that intelligent life demands "self-awareness". The understanding that you exist, that you can (somewhat) control your own environment, and that you can control your own destiny.

Otherwise, you just go **** the nearest squirrel.

The various religions are produced by the various cultures and societies they arise in. To dispute that is a special kind of believing.